College Hall Meeting for USAID Funded Health Project

Following the launch of the Health Informatics Governance and Data Analytics (HIGDA) Project, earlier this year, participants from implementing institutions converged for the first College Hall meeting at JKUAT, Wednesday May 10, 2017.

During the event, the students were introduced to the project’s scope; especially those related to curriculum review and the development of innovations to assist in digitization and sharing of health related data.

Addressing the participants, Head of e-Health programme at the Ministry of Health (MoH), Onesmus Kamau said effective planning and decision making in Kenya’s health sector had been hampered by low quality data.

Consequently, Onesmus added, the government was looking to tap into innovations that can aid data collection, curation and analysis towards.

Deputy Vice Chancellor in Charge of Academic Affairs, Prof. Romanus Odhiambo commended the participating scientists and institutions, saying multidisciplinary research and innovation was the way to go.

Prof. Odhiambo challenged the team to ensure high quality input in various aspects of the project while observing integrity and prudent resource utilization.

Participants were taken through the working of the Health Information System within the MoH and existing opportunities for collaboration between the Ministry and academia on data analytics, visualization and sharing.

HIGDA Project is funded by the United States of America through USAID and aims to help the Ministry of Health (MoH) achieve single, strengthened, and unified, Integrated Health Information System (H.I.S) at national and county levels.

Participating institutions in the project are: Palladium Group, Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, and PATH International.